Back in the USSR: Opera North’s Eugene Onegin – Leeds Grand Theatre
Tchaikovsky’s life had a habit of imitating his art. In the spring of 1877, while he was sketching an opera based on Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin – starting, so the story goes, with Tatyana’s letter scene – he received a passionate letter from a former student, Antonina Milyukova, declaring her love. Determined not to turn her away as coldly as Onegin does, he married her that summer. It was a disaster, and within weeks he had fled.
The story itself is simple enough. Tatyana, a bookish country girl, falls for the aloof Onegin, friend of the poet Lensky, who is engaged to her sister Olga. She pours her heart out in a letter; he hands it back with a lecture. At her name-day party a bored Onegin flirts with Olga, Lensky challenges him to a duel, and Onegin kills his friend. Years la...